This is a list of questions to help developers get a sense of the the places they're interviewing. Because no one deserves a bad fit.
- What is your dress code?
- What time do people generally arrive and leave?
- What is the lunch break situation, or what do people tend to do for lunch? Do people eat together? Do they tend to work through lunch?
- Do developers work from home or on a non-synchronized schedule?
- Are there options for working from home, even partially?
- If so, what tools do you use to make sure everyone communicates effectively? Do they work?
- Are there weekly or monthly staff meetings?
- On average, how much time would a developer spend per week in meetings?
- How much paid time off is given? What's the process for getting that approved?
- Can I see [and hear] where I'll be doing my work?
- Will I get SSH access to your servers?
- Will I get root/Administrator access to my machine?
- What front-end and back-end stacks do you run? How do you choose these?
- What percent of work per week that happens within a content management system? Who has access to this CMS aside from developers?
- What percentage of your developers’ time is used to build html emails?
- Can I look at your code stack?
- How long does it take for a dev working in my general skill area to set up a local environment? What is involved with that? Docker, Vagrant, none of the above?
- How often do your developers lose time to maintaining, patching, or updating their local environment?
- Is your process client-driven, or user-driven?
- How do you do user research?
- How do you determine what features get pulled into the product?
- How do you approach technical debt?
- What's the relationship between development and UX, or between development and product?
- How often am I coding from comps? Where do these come from?
- What's your company's approach to time tracking?
- What's your company's approach to estimation?
- How does the team’s leadership [or the product’s leadership] deal with unreasonable feature requests?
- How much time do you expect I'll be working on legacy products/projects, versus shipping new ones?
- Let's say I'm in this position for a year. What would it look like for me to be a total success?
- Followup to previous question: What will our development/engineering team/product look like then, given that success?
- Do your engineers/developers get to choose their own toolsets? [For instance, if I want to work in a Docker container rather than running MAMP locally, is that cool?]
- Followup to previous question: Do your developers get to choose their own stacks? If I want to write a thing in React, am I allowed, or do I have to stick to what you're already using?
- Do you care about pixel perfection? How many UI reviews does the code undergo?
- Do you have a code standard? If so, how do you balance adherence to a standard with knowing when to revise it, or ignore it altogether?
- How are performance reviews/salary reviews handled?
- What in my background (or on my resume) do you see as the most beneficial for the team?
- Which departments do you interface with the most?
- Are projects usually by team, or solo? How is team assignment determined?
- What percentage of the time will I be working in/on a CMS? Which one is it?
- What percentage of the time will I be working in/on HTML emails? How are they built/managed?
- Do developers have a conference/book/research budget?
- Are there weekly or monthly one-on-ones with technical mentors?
- How do you ensure that people on your tech team continue learning?
- Do you have a 20% time policy?
- What challenges does the department/company face in the next month/six months/year?
- Can I meet the developers I’m working with?
- Am I taking a person’s place on the team? Why are they leaving? Where do they fall on the org chart?
- Who do I answer to?
- Do I manage/mentor anyone?
- Does/how does your technical/product/customer/executive leadership work on the product on a regular basis?
- Does/how does your technical/product/customer/executive leadership use the product on a regular basis?
- Is the team growing? What are your needs right now?
- How do you avoid team-wide burnout?
- What’s the churn like? How many people have left in the last year, and why did they leave?
- How diverse are the developers here? How do you address the issue of diversity in the field?
- How important is your technology to the core of your company's mission?
- How much runway does the company have?
- Are you currently fundraising?
- Tell me about the distribution of your clients/users. If you do client work, what percentage of your revenue comes from your biggest client?
- What's the ratio of developers to non-developers company-wide?
- How do you make sure the separate teams in the office respect one another’s work?
- Tell me about a project that didn't go well.
- What kinds of things are celebrated with company outings?
- Is childcare an option for these outings?
- Are these outings exclusively at bars?
- Tell me about your deploy schedule. Do you use continous integration?
- Do you practice TDD?
- Pair programming? Code review? Code standards? What do I have to do to get work merged?
- If an aspect of your site/app goes down, like if a mail form stops sending mail, whose job is it to fix that?
- Who hosts your work? Rackspace, aws, heroku, managed something or other?
- Do you use any kind of application-level metrics tracking (graphite, datadog, etc)? If so, who decides what gets measured and what acceptable values of it are? Is there a team responsible for generating a metrics library, or does every team roll their own solution?
- Do any of your devs have pager duty? Do developers get to define their own services' alert thresholds and checks?
- Do any of your devs have to work overnight [eg on a deploy]? If so, does this work get additionally compensated in some way?
- What are the chances that I'm going to get a call after hours for a non-outage-related issue?